Measurement Error Issue
Measurement Error
In the study done by Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996), measurement error was an issue when looking at whether priming concepts of old age caused people to walk out of the room more slowly. This issue came about because the measurement method that was used was imprecise. It relied on a person measuring walking speed with a stopwatch. While the stopwatch itself was accurate, the issue was focused on whether the person doing the measuring was pressing the start and stop buttons at the same point for each person he or she was measuring. Based on what the person was thinking, feeling, and doing, he or she could have easily pressed the button sooner or not as quickly for any particular person being observed. This may have been an unconscious behavior, but would still have a strong effect on the results of the study and how the information was analyzed. In the replication study done by Doyen, et al. (2012) this issue was addressed by using a timing method that was less likely to be subjective, and the result was that...
(2012) did two things differently. First, the experiment was conducted using an infrared beam as a measurement device, so it could not be affected by whether a person pressed a button at a specific time each and every time. Second, the experiment was also done with a person and a stopwatch, but the person using that measurement method was the one who was told whether the participant being measured would likely walk faster or slower. The power of suggestion was enough for the person doing the measuring to measure the participants according to what he or she anticipated, as opposed to what was truly taking place. Naturally, that did not allow the Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996) study to be replicated, but it did shed light onto the idea that it is possible to unconsciously adjust what a person believes to have seen or what he or she expects quite easily.
The task-set reconfiguration hypothesis explains the task-switching cost by addressing the cuing of the task…
